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The United States Institute of Peace (USIP) was established by Congress in 1984 as an independent, federally-funded national security institution devoted to the nonviolent prevention and mitigation of deadly conflict abroad.

Rising Religious Sectarian Violence in Pakistan

Thursday, December 6, 2012

The deaths of more than 150 Shiites in the past four weeks have again set off religious sectarian violence in Pakistan. Dozens of Shiite mosques and neighborhoods and Shiite religious processions in the cities of Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Baluchistan were targeted by Tareek-e Taliban Pakistan, aka the “Pakistan Taliban,” and by the extremist group Lashkar-e Jhangvi.

The assassination of a renowned Shia religious scholar, Allama Aftab Haider Jafri, a senior judge, Zulfiqar Naqvi, and a religious leader, Mirza Shahid Ali, last month in Karachi reflects the high-profile nature – and brazenness -- of these targeted killings. In Rawalpindi, Taliban extremists stopped a public bus and singled out 22 Shiite Muslim passengers and then shot them at point-blank range.

The New York Times on December 3, 2012 reported that “For at least a year now, Sunni extremist gunmen have been methodically attacking members of the Hazara community, a Persian-speaking Shiite minority that emigrated here from Afghanistan more than a century ago. The killers strike with chilling abandon, apparently fearless of the law: shop owners are gunned down at their counters, students as they play cricket, pilgrims dragged from buses and executed on the roadside.”

“The bloodshed is part of a wider surge in sectarian violence across Pakistan in which at least 375 Shiites have died this year — the worst toll since the 1990s, human rights workers say,” wrote New York Times reporter Declan Walsh.

During the month of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, Shiites in particular have mourning rituals for the first 10 days to commemorate the martyrdom of descendents of the Prophet. During these religious processions, extremists have used remote control bombs or motorcycle suicide bombers to attack participants.

Despite this drumbeat of terrorist attacks against Shiites over the last few years, the government of Pakistan has arrested only about a dozen suspects. Yet, not a single person to date has been charged or held accountable.

Religious sectarian divisions in Pakistan were fomented during General Zia ul-Haq’s reign, when he patronized and promoted certain orthodox Sunni sects and supported the training of jihadists for the war in Afghanistan from 1978 through 1988. Simultaneously, as the ‘Wahabbi-Iranian’ cold war played out in Pakistan, ad hoc militia groups were established to fight and terrorize each other’s neighborhoods.

Pakistan’s religious extremism and sectarianism are furthered complicated by external and internal factors: economic crises, border disputes, cross-border trafficking, war on terror, and international interference in domestic matters rising inequality, religious intolerance, marginalized youth, and the escalation of urban violence by militant groups.

A public backlash against the Pakistani Taliban after a December attack in northwestern Pakistan that killed 134 children has raised hopes that the country’s government and military might finally muster the political will to tackle terrorism and violent extremism. U.S. Institute of Peace Director of Pakistan and South Asia Programs Moeed Yusuf considers the odds in the face of Pakistan’s deteriorating relations with India on the eastern border and a new, though divided government in a still-shaky Afghanistan to the west.

The Pakistani Taliban’s killing of more than 150 people at the Army Public School in Peshawar in December spurred the Pakistani government to draft a new National Action Plan against terrorism. A primary architect of that plan, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, discussed his country’s terrorism challenge on Feb. 18 in his first public appearance in Washington since taking office in 2013.

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Wazhma needed a lawyer. She could no longer stand the beatings her husband was inflicting in a marriage that she had not wanted in the first place. As a third-year medical student, she knew she had rights and she wanted a divorce. Hers was one of 11 cases that the Women Defense Lawyers’ Advisory Council took to court in Afghanistan over the course of a year.

This report sheds light on the controversial 2014 presidential election in Afghanistan through the murky lens of the Taliban. How did they view it? Was the violence as high as in previous elections? What were their strategies in the lead-up? How did it affect their image, if at all? What strategies are they adopting in its wake? Are they moving closer to Afghan mainstream politics, which for the most part is still made of strongmen, manipulation, and corrupt patronage networks rather than based on liberal and democratic principles? Or is the mainstream moving closer to the Taliban, as far as the use of violence in the elections is concerned?

USIP Academy instructors taught two courses on policing for countering violent extremism (CVE) at Hedayah, the International Center of Excellence for CVE, located in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates from June 24 through 27.